Ever get the feeling a director just isn’t for you? Watching Her Private Hell, Nicholas Winding Refn’s first film since 2016’s The Neon Demon, it’s easy to assume that you might be missing something. Is it an Emperor’s New Clothes situation? A decade-long break would indicate that he’s been working on something genuinely monumental. When it comes to Her Private Hell, monumental it isn’t. Its unfortunate title will only embolden the inevitable wave of Letterboxd users saying their private Hell was having to sit through it.
The film takes place in a sort of neon-drenched dystopian hellscape. Several lavish sets populate the piece, from a hotel with golden Kubrickian corridors and a barren-looking sequence of skyscrapers heavily borrowed from Blade Runner. As a strange mist threatens to engulf this futuristic metropolis, Elle (Sophie Thatcher) sets out in search of her father, a man bizarrely named Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott). At the Tower Hotel, which pokes up into the clouds Jack and the Beanstalk-style, amplifying the idea we’re in a modern-day fairytale, she meets Hunter (Kristine Froseth), a salacious brat of an influencer, and Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), Elle’s stepmother, only marginally her senior. As the quest to find Johnny Thunders kicks off, Elle crosses paths with an American GI (Charles Melton) busy fighting the yakuza in the grime of Golden Gai alleyways to rescue his daughter from the bowels of Hell.
The film contains a few facets worth admiring: for one, it’s stunningly shot, and the cinematography from Magnus Nordenhof Jønck is entirely on point. Half the shots feel like they could be in an art gallery or at the very least, a popular Instagram page. The sound design is immaculate too, the eerie synths and 80s-style reverb from Pino Donaggio, neatly complementing the film’s aesthetic. Diego Calva makes his second Cannes appearance this festival (he’s also in Club Kid), and he’s always a pleasure to see work.
Stylistically, then, this probably achieves what it sets out to do. But audiences don’t favour style over story. What made Refn’s earlier works special (like Drive or The Pusher Trilogy) was how the stylistic choices and atmospheric imagery worked in tandem with a compelling story and characters you actually cared about. It’d be a challenge for any cinemagoers to really care about Her Private Hell’s bonkers coterie of deadpan weirdos. At one point, Elle and Dominique start barking at each other, and Hunter comments, “Wow, I didn’t know you guys spoke wolf.” Elsewhere, characters make assertions like: “I am the victim of mist!” and “I am made of stardust.” It’s baffling dialogue like this that feels completely detached from reality and only distances you from the film even further.
Among the other surreal choices are a demon called the Leather Man preying on lost, absent daughters, and Melton’s Private K embroiled in a series of exceptionally violent sequences that rival Evil Dead for levels of gaudy exorbitance. Refn displays a frankly startling fixation with gouged-out eyeballs and severed hands. Shakespeare shared this obsession so perhaps this is forgivable, but Shakespeare also remembered to include dialogue people wanted to hear. Seeing this at Cannes, the walkouts were hard to miss. (I counted 43 in total.)
The film has its defenders, and it’s not hard to see why. There’s a lurid, pulpy audacity to the whole thing – it’s based loosely on a 1960s Norman J. Warren exploitation film, and some prior familiarity with that material might colour the experience differently. As a companion piece to Megalopolis, it would make for a genuinely deranged double bill of willfully absurd auteur swings. For pure originality, it earns something – the Argento-esque beauty of it all is real – but a gorgeous fever dream still needs a story at its centre.
As it stands, Her Private Hell is a film of extraordinary surfaces and almost nothing underneath, a hellscape you can admire without ever really being troubled by. Whoever it’s for, they’re welcome to it.
★★
In US Cinemas July 24th, UK release TBC / Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Kristine Froseth, Havana Rose Liu, Diego Calva / Dir: Nicolas Winding Refn / Neon, byNWR, MUBI (UK) / 18
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